Product Description

It's not a question. It is a philosophy to live by. It's Donny Deutsch's motto. And it is the secret possessed by every person with the right stuff—the one-in-a-hundred who gets to the top of their team, their company, their business, their industry.

If there is an assignment or a promotion up for grabs, a client or account looking for new answers, do you know how to go for it? Donny Deutsch built a billion-dollar media business asking himself the basic question, "Why Not Me?" Once the reader asks—and answers—that question, a world of opportunity opens up. It is a tool to motivate people, build a business, and create a business culture.

Often Wrong, Never in Doubt is an inspirational book from one of America's most colorful and exciting entrepreneurs. It's Donny's story. In a fun conversation with the reader, Donny lays out the core principles that propelled him to create tremendous wealth, build a huge and influential business, and become a national personality. Using inside stories of the media, the advertising industry, and a youth spent growing up on the streets of New York, Donny gives the commonsense bottom line that he has learned along the way, broken down into real, relevant, and inspiring lessons that will be useful to everyone from the front-line salesperson to the middle manager to the successful corporate executive. (It's also a useful guide for dating.)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #378838 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-01
• Released on: 2005-10-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 1983, Deutsch joined his father's small New York City advertising agency and, over the next two decades, built its annual billings to $1.5 billion. In 2000, he sold the company for $280 million and jumped into media, creating a film production company and hosting a CNBC talk show. There's a lesson or two worth hearing in this story, but readers will have to work to find them in the midst of Deutsch's bluster. True to the book's title, he delivers contradictory ideas with equal forcefulness—as when he denounces cigarette and video game advertising as socially irresponsible, yet holds up his agency's campaigns for Tanqueray and drugs as great successes ("The amount of money we made advertising pharmaceuticals was staggering"). [...] Yet he astutely argues, in a chapter on the "Hungry-Eye Hiring Theory," that the most productive employees are often a little angry; they've got "something to prove." Hit and miss, this book suggests that, in advertising at least, the quest for success is best fueled by arrogance and testosterone. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Under Donny Deutsch's leadership as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Deutsch Inc., the company has grown into the nation’s premier cutting-edge advertising agency, with blue-chip clients, including Mitsubishi Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Revlon, Coors, Novartis, Expedia, Monster, and Old Navy. Both Advertising Age and Adweek have honored the $2.7 billion agency time and again as “Agency of the Year.” Informed, opinionated, influential, and funny, Donny recently launched a hip and irreverent CNBC talk show, The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, which examines issues in pop culture, business, politics, the arts, and sports. He is also Managing Partner of the independent film production company Deutsch Open City. In presidential politics he was a lead member of the successful Clinton/Gore communications team. A graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Donny now serves on two prestigious boards: UPenn School of Social Work’s Executive Committee and the Board of Directors of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

From AudioFile
Though his celebrity may sell it, it's Donny Deutsch's street smarts and humanity that make this one of the most enduring lessons on running a small business, in this case advertising. Part memoir, part primer on managing clients in a creative business, the material also discusses managing oneself with integrity, a healthy respect for other people, and an honest perspective on one's individual talents and contributions. With its strong writing and the narration of co-writer Peter Knobler, who reads with a Manhattan accent, this is an entertaining listening experience that is also motivating and inspiring without being explicitly so. A worthy addition to one's audio business library. T.W. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Donny Deutsch Comes As Advertised - A Review of "Often Wrong, Never In Doubt"
Fasten your seat belts! This will not be a normal book review. It took me 200 pages to figure out why I was having such schizophrenic reactions to this book. After reading a chapter, I would find myself thinking: "What an interesting guy Donny Deutsch seems to be; I'd like to meet him."

And then I would read a chapter that would leave me muttering to myself: "What a jerk! I can't believe what he just said!" I would plow ahead in the book and begin to think: "What an interesting organization he has built. I would love to help them recruit the kind of innovative thinkers and risk takers they seem to value." And then I ran across a string of pages full of profanity and several paragraphs of Deutsch describing his sexual fantasies in the office. Finally, I threw up my hands and said to myself: "What is going on here! Surely, Deutsch is savvy enough to know that he is going to turn off some people with his outrageous revelations and observations. And even if he were not, he has a co-writer who should be able to alert him when he has crossed a line. And what about the editors and Harper Collins? Why are they allowing such outrageous material in a "business book?"

The epiphany came as I read on Page 206 Deutsch's quotation of a character from the TV show "thirtysomething":

"'What I do,' he said, `is strictly chemical. It is reactive. I cause reactions.'"

His invitation to peer behind the Wizard's curtain continues with these words: "My individual brand and the company's have mimicked my age in life. My personal brand for years was the brash, upstart Ad Guy of the Generation, the Bad Boy. It has stuck with me and now I can't get rid of it. Tomorrow I could take over Omnicom (the largest advertising holding company in the world), wear three-piece suits and be the most serious businessman in the industry, and I'd still be seen as the Bad Boy. I'd like to lose that, but I'm not sure I will. I accept the challenge." (Page 219)

With those pithy words, Donny Deutsch the author helped me to understand Donny Deutsch the "advertising world's Bad Boy." As a reader, I had been reacting - reeling from chapter to chapter, responding to the strings that the puppet master was pulling. As Deutsch and Peter Knobler, his collaborator on this project, developed the book, they used it to "advertise" the various facets of Donny's personality and persona. So, he comes across as a protean and complex individual - one moment disarmingly self-disclosing, the next moment brash and outrageous, and the next instant, incredibly sensitive, kind and giving.

I applaud Harper Collins for their courage in following Donny's lead and stepping out of their comfort zone and publishing an author who does not allow himself to be conformed to anyone else's mold or set of expectations. Deutsch has been enormously successful in building a top-ranked advertising organization - and empire. Two things impressed me in a positive way as my mental Polaroid image of Deutsch finally took on full color and clarity. First, he risks, and because he risks, he wins more often than he loses. Second, he values his people, and places them in positions to win.

One side note, I applaud his use of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry as a case study:

"The two best-defined brands in major league baseball are the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. You can tell them apart from a distance. The Yankees stand for the winning combination of quality and wealth. The Red Sox, you know that they stand for: The hate the Yankees. That hatred is what drives them and it is exactly that hatred that got them to the Promised Land. Starting with the Curse of the Bambino and moving through Bill Buckner's legs to Pedro Martinez's Yankee "daddies," the Red Sox had more motivation to win than any other team in baseball.

And how smart they were to personify this hatred. The new Red Sox owners, after losing a bidding war for a prized Cuban pitcher, actually called their rivals "the evil empire." In one memorable phrase - like any good advertising campaign - they used national politics and popular culture to define the Yankees as a combination of the Cold War-era Soviet Union and Darth Vader! What better enemy?" (Pages 222-223)

All I can say to the previous quotation is: "Amen and Amen!"

I found the book to be a worthwhile read, so I am pleased to recommend it - but with this caveat: "Fasten your seat belt!"

Often Wrong, But Never In Doubt: Unleash The Business Rebel In You by Donny Deutsch with Peter Knobler.

Good but not great
I love business books. This is a good one, not a great one. I happen to really like Deutsch on his CNBC show. He is full of energy and his show is fun to watch. The book starts out strong with great stories about his childhood, college years and then getting into the advertising business. One thing that did bother me was Deutsch made it out like he was a sub par student and not well motivated. Yet he attended the prestigious Wharton School of business. In the middle chapters of the book, it just seemed to drag on and on. The first half of the book was a quick read. The second half was just too technical and if you are not in the advertising business, it was like reading a text book. Stick with his TV show.

Bluster, yes, but an occasional insight

Others have shared their reactions to this book. Here are three of mine. First, I am always interested in personal accounts of a successful career and Deutsch reveals a great deal about his -- and about himself -- more than he perhaps realized when writing it. The title is an eye-catcher. In fact, he discusses several of his doubts along the way and acknowledges poor decisions and their consequences. These doubts are of much less interest to me than how he overcame them and what lessons he learned from doing so. Also, there is often a fine line between self-confidence and narcissism. All I know about Deutsch is limited to his book. Based on that, I think he would be -- at times -- insufferable but never boring. And when it serves his purposes, charming. Finally, Deutsch has much of value to say about setting ambitious objectives and then pursuing them with focus and vigor. I recently read two brief biographies of Ulysses S. Grant who, when heading the Union forces, demonstrated how important that can be to achieving ultimate success. On balance, I was entertained and informed more often than irritated while reading this memoir (of sorts) but have neither the interest nor the inclination to learn more about its author.